2008-03-17

Greeble a 3D City: Tutorial 2: The Cityscape

A city can be constructed using 3D Studio Max in under 5 minutes using the Greeble Plugin and a few simple steps. In the second part of our series on Greebling a City we take a look at creating the cityscape itself.

Create a new Plane object as pictured below, we used 100x100 units with 10x10 width and length segments (hint: press F4 to view the outline view if it is not visible):

This creates our basic outline, we now want to convert this plane to a Editable Poly, to do this simply right click and select 'Convert to Editable Poly', as pictured below:

Step 2: Greeble the City

Now we have an editable polygon we can click on our Modify list and select Greeble:

As soon as we click Greeble a basic cityscape will appear with small units on the roof and a low rise city block. There are a couple of tweaks we want to make to create a more city like view, firstly set 'Taper' to 0 and increase the height to say 35 units. This produces the city block illustrated below:

You now have the basics for building a city, if you clone the block and change the heights in each section you will begin to build a background cityscape in which to insert various more detailed buildings as seen in our first tutorial.Road layouts can be included and more realism by including simple additions such as street lights and signage. Greeble can be an extremely useful tool for quick and easy city models, we hope this tutorial as provided an insight into how to quickly and easily build your own city.

In future tutorials we will look at Rendering the City, as previewed here and if there is interest taking a look at creating road junctions and textures, let us know if there are any additions you would like to see...